


Pale Portraits

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Under The Pendulum Sun - Jeannette Ng
Genre: Body Horror, Bondage, Incest, Manipulation, Multi, POV Second Person, Sewing patterns into skin, Smut, Threesome, Threesome - one character directing the other two, dubcon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-30
Updated: 2020-05-30
Packaged: 2021-03-02 21:15:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24453520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: Catherine Helstone would do anything for her brother. No one could fault you for taking advantage of that.
Relationships: Catherine Helstone/Mab | The Pale Queen/Laon Helstone
Comments: 7
Kudos: 10
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	Pale Portraits

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kimaracretak](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kimaracretak/gifts).



There was always a door. You made certain of that.

When Catherine Helstone and her brother travelled by bone-rattling coach through vast oceans of carnivorous grass; or along a valley where a sentient katabatic wind stole the breath of anything living in its path; or stayed a night in a village strung between the boughs of the trees of an ancient petrified forest, where to touch the ground itself was to be transformed instantly into stone, and the body parts of the careless were memorialised as stone faces screaming out from the parapets of bridges: there was always a door.

Or here: an inn arranged around a courtyard in the Elizabethan fashion, with bone for its exposed beams and skin for plaster. Living flesh stretched drum-tight and flecked with hairs. When Catherine Helstone looked closely she saw the quiver of a pulse.

The proprietor of this fine establishment had merged with the glistening flesh of the inner wall at his lower back and left elbow. They were shown to a room resembling a chambered heart by a boy who looked more or less human, and who hopped from foot to foot if he had to stop moving for any length of time. Before he took his leave he advised them not to let bare skin touch the walls. Or the floor. Or, if they could at all help it, the bed.

Here too, there was a door. So plain and innocuous that Catherine Helstone might have overlooked it if she hadn’t already been searching. She took pains to ensure this door, like the others, was bolted before she went to sleep, but nothing in Arcadia was ever so simple. You had already stealthed into her dreams and seen the truth: that to her the doors were an Ariadne’s thread that in extremis might lead her and her brother to safety. In theory, at least. In practice they might well lead the other way, to the heart of the labyrinth where the monster lurked. Either way, they led to Pivot. To the Pale Queen. To you.

Safe? Perhaps not, but familiar at least. A somewhat known danger. So she told herself when her resolve faltered. When her brother’s sermon was attended by a lady of the fae who looked for all the world like a lamia, listening in rapt attention with her tail coiled around her and her face concealed beneath a hood of finely embroidered silk. Afterwards, when they partook of tea, she admitted with frank amusement that she hadn’t quite decided whether or not she ought to eat them yet.

To this Catherine Helstone smiled weakly and offered to pour, reminding herself that she was protected. Your geas, repeated silently in her thoughts, whispered beneath her breath like a prayer before bed. They were safe; no one and nothing could harm them, and should something try, _well…_ there was always the door.

But in the meantime, there was the geas, bound to her blood. _Her_ blood, and not her brother’s. If she had sense, she might have begun to wonder why. Or to recall that the binding oaths of the fae are usually to be trusted as little as their gifts. Or that being safe from harm was not exactly the same thing as being _safe_.

Too late now.

* * *

Even here in Pivot there was a door.

This one was honey-coloured wood, studded with brass. An elaborate handle, with a solid lock and visible gears. One she hadn’t noticed before, despite the many times she’d made her way down this corridor to her brother’s sick-bed, yet suddenly here it was, closer to her brother’s chamber than she felt comfortable with. Why else would it have been here unless it led back the way they’d come?

At the door to her brother’s room she drew the key from her pocket. Brass; teeth; polished bone: it shifted form beneath her fingers, the bow always fiting into the hollow of her palm as though it were meant for her, this key with which she kept her brother prisoner to her own jealous whims.

Not that Catherine Helstone thought of it that way, of course.

She intended to face this crisis as any missionary ought, and act as her brother’s helpmeet, brisk and practical even in the face of disaster. And so she composed herself before she knocked, and didn’t wait for a response before setting the key into the lock. A series of clicks radiated out from the keyhole like the snapping of fine bones.

Inside the close air reeked of sweat and the sickbed. Sweat prickled at her scalp as she drew in her brother’s scent with every breath. The room was far worse than the last time she’d been here, as if a destructive force had torn through it with the strength of a whirlwind, ripping the mattress and the bedding into shreds, and scattering them across the floor in a thin snowfall of feathers. Her brother lay on what was left of the bed, as if he’d collapsed there, exhausted after his frenzied attack on the furnishings. Light streamed through the tattered curtains, banding in tiger-stripes across his face. He made no acknowledgement of her presence.

Slowly, Catherine Helstone exhaled. Balancing the tray on her arm, she closed the door and locked it again. When she slipped the key into her pocket, she squeezed her fist tight about it for a moment as if its solid weight could keep her anchored to the ground.

As she retrieved an upended table and placed the tray upon it, her brother gasped her name.

She swung around, her face momentarily alight with joy, but of course it was not to her that he was speaking. He had raised himself on his elbows, gazing up at the vaulted ceiling. Nervously, not entirely of her own free will, she followed his gaze. The rafters were all but lost in the gloom, but it seemed for a moment as if a blanket of fog billowed across the ceiling, bulging out as creatures swarmed beneath the surface.

There was nothing there. And yet...

“Yes,” her brother said, and laughed, his eyes fever-bright. “Yes, I will. _Yes_.”

His voice was weak, cracked with ill-use. When they first came here, he'd screamed his throat raw, striking out at her while she tried to tend to him. Perhaps, even in his fever, he remembered how much it had hurt when she tore the creature’s stitches free.

Unnerved, she moved briskly to the window and tugged open the curtains to let the light flood in, pretending not to have heard his groan of protest. “There,” she said. “Some light.”

“Leave me be.”

“It’s me, Laon,” she said, approaching the bed. “It’s Cathy.”

His eyes swept over her as if he did not see her, but _through_ her to some other place, a world of utter darkness, far, far away from the light of your lantern. His irises flickered, tracing movement in the air between them until his strength gave way and he subsided on the bed, her strong vital brother made dissolute by sin and sickness.

She took his limp hand in hers, and brought it to her lips to kiss, tasting the sweat on his skin.

She had some soup for him, she said, if he would like to eat. She had drawings of Pivot, she said, if he would like to see them.

He made no response. To fill the silence, she told him of everything she’d seen in Pivot: gleaming houses of polished clockwork; mechanical dragonflies the length of her forearm; the clocktower that rose up so high it seemed to wish to challenge the pendulum sun itself. She talked until her voice broke, until every drop of the soup was gone, until she couldn’t force out another word.

And still he made no response.

* * *

In her dreams you watched alongside her as it happened all over again. Their host was a slender fae lord, his face concealed behind a mask of polished brass. One of many curious about the missionary and his sister, although doubtless it was less their message of God he found curious than _your_ reasons for taking interest in them. He described himself as a collector, and showed them around his home, leading them from room to room, through echoing chambers and down winding staircases, until their feet ached.

He insisted on showing Catherine Helstone a room filled with butterflies, pinned to boards but still impossibly alive, fluttering desperately despite the pins that kept them fixed in place. The room was filled with a flurry of constant motion, and she struggled to hide her horror while her host’s hand rested lightly upon her shoulder.

“It’s quite a collection,” she managed, then she looked around and realised her brother was missing. “Where is Laon?”

“He ought not to wander off,” their host said with little interest. “It isn’t safe.”

She pushed past him, calling out her brother’s name, and seemed to hear his voice from the depths of the house. You followed her down a spiralling cone-shaped staircase, fashioned from the shell of an enormous sea snail. The walls were opalescent, the steps of gritty sand. The lost wind whistled past her, calling mournfully for the ocean.

She found her brother in the darkness, far from the light of the pendulum sun. He lay prone, with a creature crouched over him, a living fog coiling around them both. There was a noise, a faint buzzing like a swarm of bees, and her steps faltered as she drew close to him. His clothes had been ripped open to bare his chest. Above him the creature shone like moonlight. Its hands moved above his chest with deft gestures that seemed oddly familiar.

When she saw his chest, her throat tightened in fear. The creature, whatever it was, had marked him, sewn a latticework of embroidery into every visible inch of his skin and left him bleeding from each miniscule wound.

A sob gathered in her chest, trapped like a caged songbird. She pressed a hand to her mouth and swayed on her feet. “Laon...”

The creature’s head turned. A sinuous movement, like a flock of starlings banking across the sky. It had Catherine Helstone’s face. Transformed, luminous, as if lit from within by moonlight. Its eyes were large and shining black, and Catherine Helstone saw a glimmer of her own reflection in their depths. The creature was not, as far as she could tell, a changeling, although she still didn’t have the first clue what a changeling truly was.

The creature’s lips split open. Its mouth was an empty gaping maw, black as its eyes. It groaned, the sound reverberating and intensifying until it rose to a dull roar. Without warning, it broke apart, dispersing into a swarm of countless tiny flies. Catherine Helstone cried out in shock and threw her arms up to protect her face, while her brother gasped out her name.

Catherine Helstone dropped to her knees by her brother and pulled him to his feet as the creature darted closer, a swirling devil of spinning flecks of light. They clustered back into a single form, fanning out fragile wings like isinglass to create the illusion of skin. Even Catherine Helstone could hear it singing out, its voice an echo of her own, but sweeter and far more captivating. Mournful too: the mindless thing was hungry and she was stealing away its dinner.

There was, of course, a door.

* * *

“He’s getting worse,” she told you. “I don’t know how to help him.”

She had submitted meekly to allowing you to dress her, in a snow-white dress of trailing feathers. It had a bodice fine as spider-silk, and indeed that was exactly what it was, the silk spun directly onto her body while she closed her eyes and tried not to shudder at the sensation of eight hundred legs dancing across her naked skin. Yet she bore it without complaint. It must have been discomfiting to have you so close, twining a tendril of her hair around your finger, as if you could reel her in like a fish upon the line.

“Open your eyes,” you told her. She obeyed and stared at her reflection with a numb expression. Her hair had been elaborately dressed with jewels, which a moment later revealed themselves to be living creatures: bright-shining scarabs that scuttled to different positions, a glistening millipede winding itself tighter. Her eyes met yours in the mirror, reflection to reflection.

“You promised us we would be safe from harm,” her reflection said.

“Has he _been_ harmed?”

She hesitated, tried a different tack. “Did you mean for us to meet that creature?”

You laughed. Laughed harder when you saw her shoulders tighten. She flinched as you leaned closer, this sweet child, who knew enough of tradition to steal into the land of the fae in the hopes of rescuing her beloved brother.

“Would you do anything for him?” you asked.

“Of course I would.”

“Hm.” A smile. Too many teeth. “Would he do the same for you, I wonder?” Your nails scratched at her hairline in tiny circles, tugging a lock of hair free from the emerald-green mantis keeping it pinned in place.

“I’m quite certain he would.” She jutted out her chin, grim determination in her eyes. Her brother was just the same, infuriatingly stubborn. “If there’s something I can do, then tell me. _Please._ You told me once that you were not incapable of pity.”

You could feel the fluttering pulse of her heart beneath your touch, fast as a rabbit’s. Just like prey, and a number of diverting possibilities presented themselves. One, especially pleasing, lingered: what might it be like to hunt her? To transform her into the form of a faun and pursue her full-pelt through the forest, tearing through brush and bracken with the promise of her blood in your throat.

A fine and merry chase she’d lead you, and still fighting at the moment you brought her down. Unarmed, but all the fiercer for it, clawing at you as you jerked her head back and buried your teeth in her throat. She’d keep fighting while her blood pumped hot and raw over your lips, spilling down your chin and throat, faster than you could swallow it down. More than you alone could drink. And so instead you’d fill your mouth with her heart’s blood and bring your lips to hers so you could pour it into her mouth like wine and chase it with your tongue. An offering, a reconciliation.

And perhaps next time she’d be the one hunting you.

 _Yes_ , you thought. _Yes_.

“I’ll do anything you ask,” she said, and flinched at your crow of delight, too loud, too close to her ear.

“As if,” you said, “you ever could have done otherwise.” Your fingers bit deep into her flesh. “But since you have asked so sweetly, I will show you.”

* * *

Naturally, her brother resisted her. In his fever, he struggled and fought, heedless to her murmured entreaties, how sweetly she begged him to have faith in her. It was diverting to watch at first, but you soon grew bored, and when the time came to try again, Catherine Helstone found he had been prepared, kneeling on the floor in his room with his arms stretched above his head and bound by ropes of spider silk. His expression was mulish, his cheeks flushed with anger and humiliation. His skin shone with sweat. Her gaze glanced across his naked body and away, as if she was afraid to look at him directly. False modesty. Another lie to be stripped away.

“Oh, Laon.” Her voice was thick with the tears she’d yet to shed.

“You cannot trick me, spirit.” His eyes rolled upwards, glaring at her through his sweat-soaked hair. “You are her creature. You are not my sister.”

“You’re not well.”

He gave a choked-up laugh. “Because you have _enchanted me_.”

She stared at him for a long moment, meeting his look of contempt and loathing with steadfast patience. Then she swallowed, before looking at you. “What must I do? I’ve already taken out all the stitches.”

“But the marks still remain.” You circled around his back, trailing a finger along his broad shoulders. Letting your nail catch on a scar. “If you want your brother back...”

“I do.”

“Then you must mark him yourself.”

* * *

At first she was afraid of hurting him. She talked to him in low soothing tones, as one might sooth a frightened horse, an injured dog. But this she soon stopped, since her words seemed only to cause her brother more distress. He wrenched at his bindings, at first hauling on them in an attempt to free himself, and when that did not work, simply to put more distance between them.

Her first stitches were clumsy. She kept stopping, faltering as the blood welled up on his skin at the prick of the needle, and her tastes proved disappointingly dull. When you generously offered out of the goodness of your heart to have her brother’s skin – temporarily, mark you! – removed and stretched upon a frame to make the task easier, you almost thought she was going to faint. She neglected, too, the vast haberdashery you put at her disposal, the feathers and teeth and fragile bird-bones that you had been collecting for just such an occasion, and chose instead a plain charcoal-grey thread, as plain and dull as she was. Her stitch was suitably plain and dull too, a clumsy running stitch, when you were hoping for something rather more interesting. Elizabethan blackwork, perhaps, although in fairness something so elaborate would have been entirely suited to a man like the missionary.

She flinched at her brother’s screams as the tip of the needle, itself almost as fine as a hair, pierced his skin. Her hands continued to tremble as she pushed it through, working just beneath the skin for as far as she could bear – which was never far enough – before she brought the needle up again. Only when it broke the surface did she take a gasping breath, as if the needle was a diver and she was holding her breath in sympathy. Each stitch took an age. And she kept stopping, ducking her head to hide her tears as you leant closer, crowding her as if admiring her frankly mediocre handiwork.

Less than two inches of the pattern completed and she stopped, dabbing at her face as if wiping away sweat. You suspected she was finding her brother’s screams of pain a distraction, but in that case it was all the more galling that she refused your offer of having him flayed. It really would have made matters simpler. Faster too: if she carried on at this rate, there was a significant danger that you might get bored.

“I can’t,” she said. “I cannot do it.”

“You said you would do anything,” you reminded her sweetly.

Through his harsh gasps of pain, Laon grated out, “Damn you both.”

You laughed and cupped your hand to his cheek. Beneath the skin and meat, you felt his gritted teeth grinding together like a millstone crushing wheat. He’d bite you, you thought, if he could. You’ve never known anyone so bitter, and only himself to blame, all the time he’d wasted brooding over his misplaced shame, burying it away inside him where it could do nothing but rot. How dreadfully _English_.

“Again,” you sang out, and Catherine Helstone gave you a pleading look.

“I can’t.”

“ _Again._ ”

She shuddered and took up the needle once more, leaning in so close to his back he must have been able to feel her breath on his skin. As she pierced his skin with the needle, his jaw clenched hard, his nostrils flaring as he sucked air in. The tendons in his neck were rigid, the silk bindings biting into his wrists. The scream was coming, working its way up his threat. Silent as yet, but you could already hear it in the sweat breaking out on his brow, the whiteness of his bloodless lips. Sweet boy - he didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of hearing him cry out. Well then, you’d grant his wish: let it not be said that you are not a benevolent ruler.

As the scream gathered in his throat, you slid your hand over his mouth. His body wrenched as Catherine Helstone’s needle broke new ground, and just as he opened his mouth to scream you dropped your hand. Where his mouth had been, now there was nothing but a smooth expanse of skin. The scream was strangled in his throat, a far sweeter sound and one you might have thought his sister would find less distracting.

Instead she openly wept.

You pressed your lips together in irritation. But when you turned your gaze on her, she did not quail as you might have expected, but made a visible effort to compose herself. She wiped her face, smearing blood across her right cheek, a gash of colour beneath her eye. It rather became her to have her skin painted with her brother’s blood, but you suspect she wouldn’t have been grateful for the compliment, the intransigent little creature. At the very least you might have thought she’d be grateful her brother had stopped screaming.

“What have you done?”

You took hold of the crown of his head and turned his face around so that she, craning, could see. She blanched.

“I could have taken his tongue,” you reminded her, and she paled still further, stammering an apology, which, if not quite satisfactory, would at least suffice. You were not, as you had told her before, incapable of pity. Her brother groaned deep in his throat, the whites of his eyes glistening.

“Please undo it,” she said meekly. “I’ll keep going.”

To her credit, she did. Not quite without tears, at least at first, but if she had to cry then at least she had the manners to do so quietly. Her brother, too, with his face returned to normal, controled himself, breathing through the pain, and pressing his face against his arm and biting down on the meat when he really couldn’t stop himself from crying out. Even those moments were growing fewer. Whatever spell his sister was weaving, it was working.

“Tell me,” Cathy said, and he stirred at the sound of her voice. “Tell me about your Cathy.”

After a moment of contemplation, he began to talk, his voice taut with pain. He spoke of a childhood spent on a bleak landscape beneath a bruise-black sky. And of how he longed for her, wanted only her–

“You’ll see her again,” said Catherine Helstone. “I promise you, Laon.”

“You are a creature of deceit,” he replied, but the vehemence had gone from his voice.

“Well,” you commented archly, “Aren’t we all?”

From then on, she worked in silence. Even her tears dried up as her pattern grew and adapted to the changing planes of his body. When blood welled up now she simply wiped it away with her thumb, smearing it across his skin.

Gradually, a picture emerged from the abstract outlines of her thread. One moment, there was little to be seen, the next the candlelight flickered and the images took form. Her embroidery had a power of its own, beyond the less-than-neat stitches, the simple outlines. His drying blood added depth and shadow, and it was in the spaces between that the true image lay, her version of the tale of their shared lives.

A flock of sparrows banked across his belly, gradually merging into living Arcadian mist as it crossed from one side to the other. Down the right side of his chest, a swirling pattern of Enochian runes. The left side, a sad little coffin and hands clasped tight. On his right shoulder, Gethsemene. On his left, a face that rather resembled yours.

But it was on his back that she had worked her masterpiece: a landscape of rocky outcrops and heather; the ceaseless sky. A stark jutting cliff of granite rose up along his right shoulder blade, like a tower of blocks built by a giant and abandoned. At its base, a squared-off opening, a tunnel leading through the rock. You recognised this place. You had seen it in her dreams and his, had joined both of them on their journey along that passage through the rock.

The air around them was thick and sweet as golden honey. He was breathing hard, not from pain, but from the warmth of her breath on his skin, the touch of her hands. Even the sting of the needle.

You once offered to show him the fine line between pleasure and pain. At the time he declined, but he’d learned that lesson now. His manhood was engorged with blood, the head pressing close to his belly. They were both ignoring it, but from the pink flush to her cheeks, you could tell Catherine Helstone was intently aware of it. She stiffened each time she accidentally brushed against it and her brother growled deep in his throat, his eyes squeezing shut.

And then, the final stitch. Catherine Helstone, crouched in front of him, her gaze fixed on his upper thigh and determinedly ignoring his manhood, drew the needle through and pulled the thread taut. “May I have some scissors?”

“There are no scissors,” you told her. “Use your teeth.”

She swung her gaze towards you, but she was too tired for defiance. She dropped her head, bending towards his thigh, bringing her teeth as close to his skin as she could. Her hair tangled with his pubic hair. He kept his face up, his eyes fixed on a fixed point above her head, but his colour deepened and his throat flexed as he swallowed hard. His manhood twitched with a will of its own.

Then the thread was broken and this task, at least, was finished.

Catherine Helstone waited, her hand resting against his skin. “Laon?” she said timidly. “Brother...”

“Cathy?”

“Yes!” Her face lit up with joy, like a ray of sunlight breaking through storm clouds and lancing through the gloom. “Yes, Laon, it’s me.” She rose up, sliding her hands along his chest to his cheeks so she could cup them as she kissed his cheeks, his lips. He kissed her back, less certainly, his gaze bewildered. He had the air of someone waking from a dream, and quickly pulled away from her, searching for some sign that she was not his sister.

She looked at you, betrayed. “You said–”

“The spell is not yet broken,” you said and she cried out in anguish.

“How much _more_?”

“Don’t worry, little one.” You caught hold of a strand of her hair, coiling it about your finger and tugging it just hard enough to draw from her a gasp of pain. “You’re so very close. And you’ll enjoy this part.” You leant closer, drawing in the scent of his blood. “Touch him.”

He shivered, opening his mouth to speak, and you captured his words with your hand against his mouth and a murmured, “Be still.”

She slid her hand downwards to his belly, her knuckles brushing against the head of his cock. She’d squeezed her eyes tightly closed, her cheeks reddening as as you circled around them both. Once more, she hesitated, before finally cupping the base of his shaft. Even that slight contact was enough to make him drop his head back and groan.

You leant down, pressing your hand against Catherine Helstone’s bare upper arm. Your fingers bit into her flesh, just hard enough to leave bruises. A curious thing, mortal flesh, how the marks it bore were writing of a kind, able to be read by those who knew the language, and so were able to know what was done and when, if not by whom. They had always fascinated you, bruises, how they could blossom like a field of wildflowers and how they aged, colouring from livid purple to a dull yellow-grey. You slid your hand along the length of her arm, pressing your face into her throat so you could taste the butterfly-flicker of her pulse when you pressed your hand over hers and wrapped her fingers tightly around his shaft.

“Like this,” you murmured. “Not an act you’re unfamiliar with, surely?”

But then you wondered. You knew something of his character, how he felt he should long for darkened rooms and the weight of blankets to crush every scrap of passion from such an act, because their God forbade one be allowed to see the pleasure they were experiencing. Better to be like children hiding their heads beneath the covers in the hope they would not be seen. In the pitch darkness of their chambers did she close her eyes and wait for him to pull back the covers and roll atop her? Arcadia had abraded some of her innocence away, but by no means all.

You drew her hand slowly along the shaft of his cock. Not a smooth or elegant movement – she remained resistant – but enough to draw from him a groan. At the sound, she opened her eyes, and they fixed, wide and wondering, on his face. Her lips were moistened, shining red and wet, the lower lip caught between her teeth. She stared at him as as if she wished to swallow him up, and it occured to you that this was all that that mortals were: walking bags of hunger with just enough wit to lie to themselves that they were more than that.

The next stroke of her hand was smoother, her hand gliding beneath yours as the silken skin glided over his shaft.

Until her brother spoke, forcing his words though gritted teeth. “Don’t do this, Cathy,” he said. Beneath your grip her hand faltered. “Not in front of her.”

You brought your mouth to Catherine Helstone’s ear. “He’s trying to trick you, little one. He doesn’t believe yet. The spell is not yet broken.”

“But if… if he doesn’t want me to–”

Your response to both of them was to squeeze your hand around Catherine Helstone’s, so that she could feel how hard he is. “Like iron,” you murmured in her ear. “Like granite. How can you doubt he wants you?”

“Laon…?”

Helpless, he made no answer. If he had spoken, you suspect he would have begged her to keep stroking him – _faster, harder_ – to bring him to a wordless gasping orgasm in the hopes that might satisfy you, when he must have known that such an ending could never have been enough. On his skin the patterns swirled, the heather seeming to move in an unseen wind. The room was flooded with the scent of the moors, crushed heather, damp earth and iron.

“I… I’m sorry,” Catherine Helstone said. “I don’t have a choice.” And her hand began to move of her own volition, stroking him from the base of his shaft to its head. She pressed close, as if she wanted to shield this act from your view to afford him some measure of privacy. Or, alternatively, because she longed to pull him inside of herself, because they had never been as close as she would have liked, and never could be, not when she considered them two halves of the same person.

She tensed at the touch of your hands on her shoulders, but the rhythm did not change, even when the silk of her bodice fell away like tissue paper at your touch and at your will, baring her small breasts with their dark-tipped nipples. His gaze dropped to them, and it was your time to guide her movements once more, bringing her free hand up to one of her breasts, while you caressed the other yourself, running your thumb over the nipple so that it hardened to a peak.

She mirrored your movements with a soft little moan, rolling her other nipple between finger and thumb, her gaze intent on the hunger in her brother’s expression. She gasped in mingled pleasure and pain as you gripped her hair, and twisted her head back, forcing her to rise a little so that her lips could be brought to his. His hands clenched involuntarily above his head. He wasn’t gentle. His kiss was hard and hungry, enough to leave her lips swollen and bruised. Almost as if he longed to leave a pattern of his own upon her skin.

This possibility gave you pause, and you considered it for a moment, your hands cupping her breasts as desire coiled through you like smoke.

When Catherine Helstone leant back against your skirts, you felt the press of her head on your thighs, and you pictured her between them, her hands pressing your legs apart. She’d be clumsy at that too, no doubt, you thought uncharitably, but then you remembered the tower of granite blocks, and how she’d dreamed about it, the all-but-forgotten magic that still lingered in mortal lands. It had been a while since you last lost your way: you almost missed it.

You drew up her skirts and slipped two fingers inside her. She moaned again into her brother’s chest, as you gathered her wetness and brought it to his lips. He glared balefully at you, but despite his shame, he opened his mouth to taste her. It closed hot and wet around your fingers, his tongue running down between them to the webbing before spitting them out.

Your voice hardened. “Take him.”

“But–”

“Don’t do it, Cathy,” he said. “Not in front of her. Send her away. I _will_ , once she’s gone, I swear it, but not like this.”

“He’s lying,” you breathed out. “He’ll tear out all your pretty, pretty work and run, and you will lose him forever. It is the last act, the only way to break the spell. There is no surer way to tell him who you are.” Or no surer way to lie, but this you did not mention.

She hesitated only a moment. “I’m sorry,” she told him, a new note of determination in her voice. She gathered up her skirts and positioned herself, her hand curled around the base of his shaft. Her breasts were level with his face, and you caught hold of his hair, holding his head still while her nipple brushed against his mouth. His lips parted as if he longed to draw it inside his mouth, and the tip of his tongue touched against the tip for an instant, before he pressed his lips together like a petulant child. “Laon?”

“Do it, then,” he said through gritted teeth. “Get it over with.”

Still, for all his denials, he rocked his hips instinctively towards her and groaned as she sank down on him. Her skirts settled around them in a cloud. She wrapped her legs around his backside, and slid her hands over his back, steadying herself for a moment before she began to move. His composure broke as she rocked against him, and he strained against the ropes of spider silk. You’d glimpsed these private moments between them before – nothing in Arcadia was ever truly hidden, not from you – but it was all the more delicious seeing them up close, how quickly they reached their rhythm despite the awkwardness of the position. How quickly they forgot your presence, even as you circled about them with your fingers poised at your mouth, as if they were a particularly curious art exhibit.

She ground her hips in circular movements, seeking out the contact of his pubic bone, frotting herself against the base of his cock while she clawed at his back. He cried out in pain as she tore some stitches free, and in dismay she reached upwards instead and grasped hold of the silk ropes. Through her panting breath, she told him how sorry she was, how very sorry, when to your ears she didn’t sound the least bit sorry. Instead, it seemed as if a part of her – a not-insignificant part – wanted to hurt him still further, to tear at the stitches and rip them free so that she was forced to remake them. To sew them into his skin all over again and do a better job of it too. Perhaps she’d even let you flay him this time.

“Oh, God,” she gasped, “Oh _God!_ ” You frowned, since this struck you as a singularly inappropriate moment to pray, and without warning you cut him free.

Stolen of their support, they crumpled to the ground in a tangle of limbs and genitals. He was on top of her, seeming startled by the sudden return of his control. You watched, fascinated, curious to see whether after all of his protests he would push her away.

Instead, he wrapped his arm around her backside and pulled himself harder inside her. She cried out as he brought his mouth to her throat, and, in the instant before a falling curtain of hair blocked your vision, you saw his teeth on her skin. So bound up in each other they seemed to have forgotten you were even there, they moved as one, and Catherine Helstone came first, shuddering into an orgasm. After a series of hard thrusts, he followed, plunging after her.

Afterwards, a moment or two of stillness as they recovered, the only sound in the room their gasping breaths. It was Laon who moved first, rearing up and shoving back her hair so he could search her face, distraught.

“Cathy,” he breathed, the spell broken, and then he was kissing her everywhere he could reach while he was still inside her: lips, throat, forehead, the rise of her breasts. She laughed, breathless, clinging to him, feeling beneath her fingertips the truths she’d written on his skin, and crying out his name.

In bed that night new truths were written. A hunt of a kind, but gentler than the kind you usually favoured. The smell of musk and seed filling your throat. The missionary watching, sipping honey-coloured wine while you stretched the length of your body against Catherine Helstone’s, your lips to the peak of one dark-tipped breast. The slip-grind of wetness, like to like. Then muted footsteps approaching the bed. Her brother mounted you, as though it were his due right and not merely a temporarily granted indulgence, which might still incur punishments to come. When he pulled free, he entered his sister next, no longer knowing who it was that he fucked with abandon, while beneath you Catherine Helstone screamed in pleasure, pinned down like a living butterfly, with the last scraps of her innocence finally, painfully, stripped away.


End file.
